IT Talent Shortage Or Purple Squirrel Hunt?

Employers press for H-1B increases, while job hunters say searches seem designed to rule out U.S. workers. Is there really an IT talent shortage??

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There either is or isn't a technical talent shortage in the U.S. To hear corporate leaders tell it, America's woeful inability to educate enough students in science, technology, engineering and math has left U.S. companies with a dangerously shallow talent pool.

Arguably, this shortage is at least partially the result of past outsourcing, which has been discouraging U.S. students from pursuing IT careers.

Among the solutions advocated by the management class is expansion of the H-1B visa program, which aims "to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States," as the U.S. Department of Labor puts it.

Tech companies insist they cannot hire the talent they need. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said as much last week in a statement on Code.org. And Laszlo Bock, SVP of people operations at Google, said this in a statement in January: "[A]t a time when the U.S. economy needs it most, our immigration policies are stifling innovation. The 2013 cap for the H-1B visas that allow foreign high skilled talent to work temporarily in the U.S. was exhausted by June 2012, preventing tech companies from recruiting some of the world's brightest minds."

The recently introduced Immigration Innovation Act of 2013 intends to raise the H-1B visa cap, among other immigration law changes.

But a talent shortage might just be another way of describing an unwillingness to pay market rates for talent. As Peter Cappelli, professor of management and director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School, put it in The Wall Street Journal back in October, 2011, "Some of the complaints about skill shortages boil down to the fact that employers can't get candidates to accept jobs at the wages offered. That's an affordability problem, not a skill shortage."

Although the record high set this week by the Dow Jones Industrial Average suggests a return of economic optimism, the U.S. unemployment rate is still not low enough to prevent jobs seekers in the U.S. -- particularly those trained in technical skills -- from resenting the fact that employers are looking to hire people from outside the country.

Norman Matloff, professor of computer science at the University of California in Davis, contends that foreign IT workers are popular with companies because they are de facto indentured servants. Foreign workers do not have the same rights as U.S. workers: For example, if they're being sponsored for a green card, they cannot quit and seek work at another company without resetting the green card process.

Foreign workers brought to the U.S. under these restrictions are participating in a form of human trafficking. Instead of sexual bondage, it's intellectual restraint.

Keeping workers from accepting better offers elsewhere is hugely important to technology companies, because the departure of key personnel from a project can set the project back months or more.

"If you have this urgent project going on in your company, you don't want an engineer to leave you in the lurch by going to another company," said Matloff in a phone interview. "With an American employee, there's no way to stop that. With a foreign employee, if he or she is sponsored for a green card, he or she is basically stuck."

Shackling technical talent is so important that Adobe Systems, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit and Pixar had agreements for several years not to hire employees away from one another, until the U.S. Department of Justice forced the companies to stop with the threat of an antitrust lawsuit. The department didn't manage, however, to get any of those companies to admit to wrongdoing.

Testifying earlier this week on behalf of IEEE-USA, a group representing more than 200,000 technical professionals and students, Bruce Morrison told a Congressional immigration policy subcommittee that the talent needs of U.S. companies would be better served by deregulating the process by which employers sponsor new hires for permanent residency. This would allow foreign workers to participate in the talent market on a more equitable basis.

"If an employer is willing to pay a substantial fee to sponsor a skilled foreign worker for a green card -- which means he or she can quit if they are underpaid -- that is solid evidence the employer actually needs the worker's skills," he said in prepared remarks. "But if an employer is only willing to pay a fee for a worker who cannot quit without going back to the beginning of the green card process, that indicates the employer is more interested in the indentured character of the visa, than in the worker's skills."

Beyond the objection to treating foreign workers as indentured servants, critics of the H-1B program see it as an enabler of age discrimination.

Its not even training. There are fully competent workers who apply to these jobs who aren't even interviewed. Because there's a glut. Or because they don't want to give the new hire a week to read a book on the differences between DOS 3.2 and DOS 3.3.

Look buddy, I graduated nearly at the top of my class, in EE/CS, in 2002. Have submitted my resume thousands of times to tech firms that claim to be looking to hire. I can count the replies to my applications on my fingers. There is no shortage of talent, or skill. There is a huge glut which is made even worse by the H-1B visa. The majority of IT projects fail because talented people like myself and my peers are being left on the sidelines while less than competent talent, usually on H-1B, is being hired in our places.

Firms receive often hundreds, sometimes thousands of applications for a single position in the software sector. I know domestic grads who have spent much of the past decade applying for jobs, not working, because of this nonsense. There is no shortage of talent, there is simply a shortage of employers motivated to pick up the phone and start hiring.

Training is a widely used option. Consider that only a portion of the 65,000 are IT workers, the IT industry still needs hundreds of thousands of IT workers to fulfil their needs. H-1Bs form only a drop in the ocean. So the vast majority still needs training and does get it.

A lot of the immigrants eventually settled in the U.S., so I doubt technology transfer is such a big contributor. The vast majority of startups in China and Russia are by locally-trained engineers, or U.S. university grads that went home immediately after without taking an H-1B.

Add to that the fact that electronics and IT were technologies that experienced a lot of development in the 80s outside the U.S. and a lot of the diffusion of skills in countries apart from the U.S. are down to external developments.

Also, just because your lost dominance correlates with an increase in the numbers of immigrant workers doesn't mean there is causation. American dominance in the automobile industry was lost even without the "scourge" of immigrants. The world is very much capable of developing technologies and skills without everything needing to emanate America. To assume such is a fallacy.

Remember also that two decades ago, when you claim that there was "dominance", there was already a significant proportion of software workers not being American-born.

Unless you can come up with the numbers of how many immigrant workers in the Valley went home, it is very hard to prove a "brain drain" of sorts.

The H-1B application data is available and in the public domain. It would be handy if someone evidence if you could actually collate how many of the 65,000 every year in IT actually earn below $50,000 wages. Last time I check, it wasn't too prevalent.

Finally, of course, I think it's absurd to lay the blame of larger structural problems in the industry on the H-1B scheme, when this is a drop in the ocean of the total labor force in IT.

Personally, I'd like to see the H-1B scheme scrapped, just so we can all see how the American IT industry will take a hit. The fact of the matter is, detractors like to focus on a few anecdotes of bad H-1B workers (which are bound to slip through) and utterly ignore the plnetiful success stories.

The vast majority of software workers in America are still Americans. It is still dominated by Americans. So if they seem to be doing okay, maybe it's time to look inwards, rather than outwards for the root cause of your predicaments?

Obviously, I can't claim to know you that well, but right off the bat I won't immediately call your CV impressive. You also need to align your pay and seniority expectations with your CV.